Interview with Janice Kulyk Keefer in Saturday Night, early 2004. Her novel Thieves, about Katherine Mansfield, had just come out.
The act of writing fiction, mostly made up of pondering and chin-stroking, can by no stretch of the imagination be considered a dramatic one. So it’s no surprise that popular culture has fixated on other fields, like police forensics. Still, the writing life continues to hold an endless fascination for – well, writers.
Authors have always made up an unduly high proportion of fictional characters. But the current trend goes one further by drawing on real-life scribes. Michael Cunningham’s homage to Virginia Woolf, The Hours, was a blockbuster hit; this spring Irish novelist Colm Toibin will release The Master, a novel about Henry James. And Toronto writer Janice Kulyk Keefer has just given us Thieves (HarperFlamingo Canada), which centres on the life of New Zealand-born short-story writer Katherine Mansfield.
One knock against books like these is that they tend to over-rely for their effect on the reader’s own knowledge of, and feelings for, the writer in question. Against this charge, though, Keefer is fairly secure: it’s unlikely that most of her readers will be familiar with her subject. In her lifetime, Mansfield was a literary rival to Woolf, known for pointed domestic dramas and frank treatment of subjects like childbirth. Today, though, she’s a cult figure, lacking the iconic status of many of her contemporaries. Still, her life story is rich in material: she moved from crisis to crisis with various lovers and fought a long, losing battle with tuberculosis. (Mansfield died in 1923, at the age of 34.) “She was a classic bad girl in some ways,” says Keefer. “The thing that fascinated me was her incredible zest for life.”
That fascination began at a short-story conference in France in 1988 (the centenary of Mansfield’s birth), where Keefer saw a short film about the author’s life. From there, she devoured journals, letters, and biographies, gradually zeroing in on one minor figure: Garnett Trowell, a former lover of Mansfield’s who settled in Windsor, Ontario. Trowell, it turned out, had kept a cache of letters from the author, which were donated to the University of Windsor’s library after his death. Those letters inspired Keefer: Thieves alternates an account of Mansfield’s life with a contemporary storyline involving a failed academic’s search for lost letters.
While Thieves was gestating, though, Keefer was busy with other books. A professor at the University of Guelph, she’s published poetry, short fiction, novels, and literary criticism. Her most recent subject has been eastern European immigration to Canada, explored both in her Governor General’s Award-nominated novel The Green Library (1996) and in a biography of her family, Honey and Ashes (1998).
On the subject of Mansfield, Keefer is voluble and excitable, though also clear-eyed about her subject’s personal and literary flaws. “I tried to restore the full humanity of this person,” she says. And if comparisons to Cunningham’s The Hours are perhaps inevitable – Mansfield’s own publisher is only too happy to get them started – that has Keefer a little uneasy. “I think I’m doing something very, very different,” she says, adding that Cunningham’s attempts to capture Woolf’s prose style left her irritated. “Who can write Virginia Woolf except Virginia Woolf?”
Showing posts with label Saturday Night. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saturday Night. Show all posts
Friday, November 9, 2007
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Street Life
Mini-profile of Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall; was in Saturday Night in, I think, the April 2004 ish.
It’s a common journalistic exercise: a reporter tries out life on the street for a few days, then returns to middle-class comfort to pronounce on What It’s Like to Be Homeless. But don’t put Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall in that category, even though his first book chronicles his own stint in a notorious urban shantytown.
For one thing, Bishop-Stall stayed put in Toronto’s Tent City for nearly a year, relying only on whatever resources he could scrounge. And for another, Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown (Random House Canada) is refreshingly free of political or sociological theorizing. “I wanted to write an adventure story,” says Bishop-Stall, and so the book’s focus is squarely on his daily struggles – and those of his volatile new neighbours.
Located on a patch of unused lakeside land, Tent City was home to dozens of Toronto’s homeless, who slept under canvas, slapped together homemade shacks, or lived in donated “prefabs.” Bishop-Stall joined them in late 2001 and remained until the following September, when police evicted all squatters and closed Tent City for good. For Bishop-Stall, surviving those 10 months meant building a livable shack on his own, earning food-and-booze money, and mastering the obscure social codes of his new world. (“Goof,” he learned, was the worst insult imaginable.)
The 29-year-old journalist cultivated his sense of adventure early on. Raised in Vancouver, he left home at the age of 17 to hitchhike to Costa Rica, and since then has lived at various times in Mexico, Italy and Spain, using Montreal as his on-again, off-again home base. In the fall of 2001, crisis hit as a book project and a relationship both collapsed, so Bishop-Stall decided to live in Tent City for a year and produce a book about it. “Things had kind of blown up for me in general,” he says. “I’d lost my place and my girl and my dog – living in a tent didn’t sound so bad.”
Not so bad if you don’t mind being at the mercy of rats, rainstorms and cold, not to mention everyday aggression stoked by widespread alcohol and drug abuse. “There was a particular complexity to the violence,” says Bishop-Stall. “You win a fight and you’re gonna get stabbed that night. There’s no real way to win until you have friends.” Those friends and their stories give the book much of its power. Jackie, an early ally, regularly disappears into crack binges and prostitution; another, Eddie, dreams of going straight and raising his newborn son, but instead ends up in thrall to Tent City’s dealers.
To gain the trust of those around him, Bishop-Stall was careful not to fall back on outside resources. “It’s impossible to get the story of people on the street unless you spend enough time there that you become part of it,” he maintains. He arrived in Toronto with only a small amount of money, which he quickly spent on supplies, and when he signed a book deal midway through his Tent City year, he had the advance deposited in a trust that he couldn’t access until his stay was over. He did take some precautions, though: once a month, he would meet up with his agent to turn over the notebooks he’d been filling.
Those notes form the basis of Down to This, which is presented in diary format. The day-by-day reportage does make for a long and repetitive book: at times the narrative seems an endless parade of incoherent arguments and senseless fistfights. But the form also creates a cumulative portrait of the punishing lifestyle, and captures a sense of growing dread as Tent City’s crack trade grows in power.
Post-eviction, Bishop-Stall lives in Toronto, working as a freelance journalist and working up other book ideas. He’s checked in with his old neighbours at two reunions, one six months after Tent City closed and another on the first anniversary. But he’s also suffering, he admits, from both survivor guilt and culture shock: “The hardest thing to do is relax, not be on the edge.”
It’s a common journalistic exercise: a reporter tries out life on the street for a few days, then returns to middle-class comfort to pronounce on What It’s Like to Be Homeless. But don’t put Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall in that category, even though his first book chronicles his own stint in a notorious urban shantytown.
For one thing, Bishop-Stall stayed put in Toronto’s Tent City for nearly a year, relying only on whatever resources he could scrounge. And for another, Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown (Random House Canada) is refreshingly free of political or sociological theorizing. “I wanted to write an adventure story,” says Bishop-Stall, and so the book’s focus is squarely on his daily struggles – and those of his volatile new neighbours.
Located on a patch of unused lakeside land, Tent City was home to dozens of Toronto’s homeless, who slept under canvas, slapped together homemade shacks, or lived in donated “prefabs.” Bishop-Stall joined them in late 2001 and remained until the following September, when police evicted all squatters and closed Tent City for good. For Bishop-Stall, surviving those 10 months meant building a livable shack on his own, earning food-and-booze money, and mastering the obscure social codes of his new world. (“Goof,” he learned, was the worst insult imaginable.)
The 29-year-old journalist cultivated his sense of adventure early on. Raised in Vancouver, he left home at the age of 17 to hitchhike to Costa Rica, and since then has lived at various times in Mexico, Italy and Spain, using Montreal as his on-again, off-again home base. In the fall of 2001, crisis hit as a book project and a relationship both collapsed, so Bishop-Stall decided to live in Tent City for a year and produce a book about it. “Things had kind of blown up for me in general,” he says. “I’d lost my place and my girl and my dog – living in a tent didn’t sound so bad.”
Not so bad if you don’t mind being at the mercy of rats, rainstorms and cold, not to mention everyday aggression stoked by widespread alcohol and drug abuse. “There was a particular complexity to the violence,” says Bishop-Stall. “You win a fight and you’re gonna get stabbed that night. There’s no real way to win until you have friends.” Those friends and their stories give the book much of its power. Jackie, an early ally, regularly disappears into crack binges and prostitution; another, Eddie, dreams of going straight and raising his newborn son, but instead ends up in thrall to Tent City’s dealers.
To gain the trust of those around him, Bishop-Stall was careful not to fall back on outside resources. “It’s impossible to get the story of people on the street unless you spend enough time there that you become part of it,” he maintains. He arrived in Toronto with only a small amount of money, which he quickly spent on supplies, and when he signed a book deal midway through his Tent City year, he had the advance deposited in a trust that he couldn’t access until his stay was over. He did take some precautions, though: once a month, he would meet up with his agent to turn over the notebooks he’d been filling.
Those notes form the basis of Down to This, which is presented in diary format. The day-by-day reportage does make for a long and repetitive book: at times the narrative seems an endless parade of incoherent arguments and senseless fistfights. But the form also creates a cumulative portrait of the punishing lifestyle, and captures a sense of growing dread as Tent City’s crack trade grows in power.
Post-eviction, Bishop-Stall lives in Toronto, working as a freelance journalist and working up other book ideas. He’s checked in with his old neighbours at two reunions, one six months after Tent City closed and another on the first anniversary. But he’s also suffering, he admits, from both survivor guilt and culture shock: “The hardest thing to do is relax, not be on the edge.”
Friday, May 4, 2007
The Name Game: How Books Are Titled
A piece about book titles that ran in fall 2005 in Saturday Night – the second- or third-last issue ever, I think.
Last year, the Toronto publisher ECW Press released an anthology of autobiographical essays by Italian-Canadian women – reminiscent of the Carol Shields-edited Dropped Threads books, but with a more niche appeal. There were launch parties in multiple cities, including Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax, but the festivities followed a stormy history. Before the collection was even published, several contributors, including the original editor, had pulled out of the project in a bitter fight with the publisher. The issue wasn’t royalties, or some disagreement over the editing of the text, but rather the name of the book.
ECW had come up with Mamma Mia: Good Italian Girls Talk Back, arguing to contributors that it encapsulated the subject matter and created a sense of conflict and drama. But Gina Valle, the anthology’s editor, wanted no part of that title. “I raised it with them the same day,” she says. Valle objected on several fronts: that “mamma mia” played to ethnic stereotypes, that “girls” was demeaning, and that “talk back” implied disrespect for older generations. Over months of to-ing and fro-ing, more than 30 other possible titles were put forth, and one other serious contender emerged: the milder Bravo Bella: Stories of Growing Up Italian. But the publisher’s sales force insisted that Mamma Mia was getting more enthusiastic reaction from bookstores.
So ECW stuck to that one – and also designed a cover showing a woman gesticulating with her hands, further enflaming the stereotype issue. As a result, Valle split from the project, along with about half of the original 20 contributors. One of those who stayed, Maria Coletta McLean, took over as editor and began soliciting new pieces, and ECW published the book in the spring of 2004. Since then, Mamma Mia has gone on to sell close to 5,000 copies – very respectable for a small Canadian press – while Valle has written letters of protest to various funding agencies and media outlets. Says Joy Gugeler, the ECW editor who dealt with the book: “The title was meant to express exasperation on one level, and that certainly summed up everyone’s feelings at the end of this negotiation.”
Of all the decisions that go into publishing a book, the title is one of the most fraught. It must be short, catchy, and memorable, and it has to capture the spirit of the book while also evoking intrigue or tension. At a large house, editors, publishers, sales, marketing, and publicity types might all weigh in on any given book’s title. Art directors, too, pushing for something they can work with visually. And if the book-buyers at major chains aren’t sold, the agonizing continues. But naming a book is an art, not a science, and the process tends to be driven by intuition and superstition. Ask industry veterans what makes a strong title, and their answers tend to fall along you-know-it-when-you-see-it lines. Focus groups or detailed market research? Forget it, there’s no money for that in publishing.
Small wonder that so many books leave a trail of discarded titles in their wake. In some alternate universe, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel is known not as The Great Gatsby but as Trimalchio in West Egg, and Joseph Heller is remembered for Catch-18 rather than Catch-22. Michael Ondaatje’s most recent novel was called Pale Flags, not Anil’s Ghost, and Miriam Toews won the Governor General’s Award last year for Swivelhead, not A Complicated Kindness.
Or maybe she didn’t. Back in this reality, after A Complicated Kindness took the prize, Michael Schellenberg, Toews’s editor at Knopf Canada, asked her only semi-jokingly, “Do you think your novel would have won if it had been called Swivelhead?” That early title referred to Toews’ teenage narrator’s watchful gawking, but it lacked, Schellenberg suggests, a certain CanLit gravitas. Several more titles were tossed back and forth, and at one point Toews even suggested Abattoir Life, but she dryly recalls that “everybody at Knopf shot that down pretty fast.”
Still, A Complicated Kindness has been one of the biggest Canadian hits of the past two years, so nobody’s complaining. When a book doesn’t do well, the second-guessing starts. A few years back, Random House Canada published a debut novel by British writer Eleanor Bailey, which Random publisher Anne Collins characterizes as a reader-friendly multigenerational saga. The book was called Idioglossia, a technical term for nonsense babbling, and Collins now believes the title was “completely terrifying” to readers and a crucial factor in the novel’s commercial failure.
In some ways, fiction writers and publishers have it easy when searching for a title: an evocative and not-too-specific phrase will usually do. Scan the season’s big novels – David Bergen’s The Time in Between, say – and you’ll notice that most of their titles sound nice but are essentially meaningless. With non-fiction, there’s more pressure to be clear, there’s the tricky dance between title and subtitle, and there are often more specific marketing niches to consider.
One general principle? As in comedy, incongruity is a plus. “Words that bang up against each other and set off shock waves tend to be good,” suggests John Pearce, a Toronto literary agent and longtime editor, citing John Ibbitson’s fall book about Canadian politics, The Polite Revolution. It’s also a truism that small changes can make a big difference. This fall, authors David Bercuson and Holger Herwig are releasing a book about Winston Churchill’s war conference with Franklin Roosevelt in 1941. Originally it was to be called Christmas in Washington, but that led to some confusion about the book’s identity, says the Canadian publisher, Kim McArthur of McArthur & Company: “Was it jingle jingle, decorating the Christmas tree, or was it Paris 1919?” So the book has now been renamed One Christmas in Washington, in the hope of tilting readers’ perceptions toward the latter.
Paris 1919, in fact, is itself the result of a title makeover. Margaret MacMillan’s book about the Treaty of Versailles was first published in the U.K. as Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War – a monicker the author was quite happy with. For the American publication, though, her New York editor “said anything with ‘Paris’ in it sells really well in the United States,” recalls MacMillan, who grudgingly acquiesced. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World has since become a blockbuster international hit.
Certainly, title talk can incite strong emotions. In Another Life, New York editor Michael Korda relates the story of a terse telegram from Graham Greene: “Easier to change publisher than title.” Since her own split with ECW Press over Mamma Mia, Gina Valle has collected a new anthology of stories covering the Italian immigrant experience across North America, to be published next spring by Fitzhenry & Whiteside.
The title has not yet been determined.
30
Outtake #1
When there is disagreement, an editor must turn gut feelings into compelling arguments – or bargain for a solution. Last year, Thomas Allen published the English translation of an Alberto Manguel memoir with the tricky title “Chez Borges.” Manguel wanted to call it “With Borges,” but that sounded clunky to Crean, so the two compromised. “It was a tradeoff between him accepting our design,” says Crean, “and me accepting his title.”
Outtake #2
If “changed the world” has a familiar ring, it’s because you’ve probably seen it in other book subtitles. Recycling of title tropes is endemic, from books that promise “a brief history of” something to those that cover things you must see or eat “before you die.” Numbers, too, are always popular in business and self-help books (a la The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). And just as Paris is apparently a magic word, publishers admit to some other truisms: when Random House published Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown last year, Collins took care to keep “Toronto” out of the title, for fear of alienating readers in the rest of the country.
Last year, the Toronto publisher ECW Press released an anthology of autobiographical essays by Italian-Canadian women – reminiscent of the Carol Shields-edited Dropped Threads books, but with a more niche appeal. There were launch parties in multiple cities, including Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax, but the festivities followed a stormy history. Before the collection was even published, several contributors, including the original editor, had pulled out of the project in a bitter fight with the publisher. The issue wasn’t royalties, or some disagreement over the editing of the text, but rather the name of the book.
ECW had come up with Mamma Mia: Good Italian Girls Talk Back, arguing to contributors that it encapsulated the subject matter and created a sense of conflict and drama. But Gina Valle, the anthology’s editor, wanted no part of that title. “I raised it with them the same day,” she says. Valle objected on several fronts: that “mamma mia” played to ethnic stereotypes, that “girls” was demeaning, and that “talk back” implied disrespect for older generations. Over months of to-ing and fro-ing, more than 30 other possible titles were put forth, and one other serious contender emerged: the milder Bravo Bella: Stories of Growing Up Italian. But the publisher’s sales force insisted that Mamma Mia was getting more enthusiastic reaction from bookstores.
So ECW stuck to that one – and also designed a cover showing a woman gesticulating with her hands, further enflaming the stereotype issue. As a result, Valle split from the project, along with about half of the original 20 contributors. One of those who stayed, Maria Coletta McLean, took over as editor and began soliciting new pieces, and ECW published the book in the spring of 2004. Since then, Mamma Mia has gone on to sell close to 5,000 copies – very respectable for a small Canadian press – while Valle has written letters of protest to various funding agencies and media outlets. Says Joy Gugeler, the ECW editor who dealt with the book: “The title was meant to express exasperation on one level, and that certainly summed up everyone’s feelings at the end of this negotiation.”
Of all the decisions that go into publishing a book, the title is one of the most fraught. It must be short, catchy, and memorable, and it has to capture the spirit of the book while also evoking intrigue or tension. At a large house, editors, publishers, sales, marketing, and publicity types might all weigh in on any given book’s title. Art directors, too, pushing for something they can work with visually. And if the book-buyers at major chains aren’t sold, the agonizing continues. But naming a book is an art, not a science, and the process tends to be driven by intuition and superstition. Ask industry veterans what makes a strong title, and their answers tend to fall along you-know-it-when-you-see-it lines. Focus groups or detailed market research? Forget it, there’s no money for that in publishing.
Small wonder that so many books leave a trail of discarded titles in their wake. In some alternate universe, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel is known not as The Great Gatsby but as Trimalchio in West Egg, and Joseph Heller is remembered for Catch-18 rather than Catch-22. Michael Ondaatje’s most recent novel was called Pale Flags, not Anil’s Ghost, and Miriam Toews won the Governor General’s Award last year for Swivelhead, not A Complicated Kindness.
Or maybe she didn’t. Back in this reality, after A Complicated Kindness took the prize, Michael Schellenberg, Toews’s editor at Knopf Canada, asked her only semi-jokingly, “Do you think your novel would have won if it had been called Swivelhead?” That early title referred to Toews’ teenage narrator’s watchful gawking, but it lacked, Schellenberg suggests, a certain CanLit gravitas. Several more titles were tossed back and forth, and at one point Toews even suggested Abattoir Life, but she dryly recalls that “everybody at Knopf shot that down pretty fast.”
Still, A Complicated Kindness has been one of the biggest Canadian hits of the past two years, so nobody’s complaining. When a book doesn’t do well, the second-guessing starts. A few years back, Random House Canada published a debut novel by British writer Eleanor Bailey, which Random publisher Anne Collins characterizes as a reader-friendly multigenerational saga. The book was called Idioglossia, a technical term for nonsense babbling, and Collins now believes the title was “completely terrifying” to readers and a crucial factor in the novel’s commercial failure.
In some ways, fiction writers and publishers have it easy when searching for a title: an evocative and not-too-specific phrase will usually do. Scan the season’s big novels – David Bergen’s The Time in Between, say – and you’ll notice that most of their titles sound nice but are essentially meaningless. With non-fiction, there’s more pressure to be clear, there’s the tricky dance between title and subtitle, and there are often more specific marketing niches to consider.
One general principle? As in comedy, incongruity is a plus. “Words that bang up against each other and set off shock waves tend to be good,” suggests John Pearce, a Toronto literary agent and longtime editor, citing John Ibbitson’s fall book about Canadian politics, The Polite Revolution. It’s also a truism that small changes can make a big difference. This fall, authors David Bercuson and Holger Herwig are releasing a book about Winston Churchill’s war conference with Franklin Roosevelt in 1941. Originally it was to be called Christmas in Washington, but that led to some confusion about the book’s identity, says the Canadian publisher, Kim McArthur of McArthur & Company: “Was it jingle jingle, decorating the Christmas tree, or was it Paris 1919?” So the book has now been renamed One Christmas in Washington, in the hope of tilting readers’ perceptions toward the latter.
Paris 1919, in fact, is itself the result of a title makeover. Margaret MacMillan’s book about the Treaty of Versailles was first published in the U.K. as Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War – a monicker the author was quite happy with. For the American publication, though, her New York editor “said anything with ‘Paris’ in it sells really well in the United States,” recalls MacMillan, who grudgingly acquiesced. Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World has since become a blockbuster international hit.
Certainly, title talk can incite strong emotions. In Another Life, New York editor Michael Korda relates the story of a terse telegram from Graham Greene: “Easier to change publisher than title.” Since her own split with ECW Press over Mamma Mia, Gina Valle has collected a new anthology of stories covering the Italian immigrant experience across North America, to be published next spring by Fitzhenry & Whiteside.
The title has not yet been determined.
30
Outtake #1
When there is disagreement, an editor must turn gut feelings into compelling arguments – or bargain for a solution. Last year, Thomas Allen published the English translation of an Alberto Manguel memoir with the tricky title “Chez Borges.” Manguel wanted to call it “With Borges,” but that sounded clunky to Crean, so the two compromised. “It was a tradeoff between him accepting our design,” says Crean, “and me accepting his title.”
Outtake #2
If “changed the world” has a familiar ring, it’s because you’ve probably seen it in other book subtitles. Recycling of title tropes is endemic, from books that promise “a brief history of” something to those that cover things you must see or eat “before you die.” Numbers, too, are always popular in business and self-help books (a la The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). And just as Paris is apparently a magic word, publishers admit to some other truisms: when Random House published Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown last year, Collins took care to keep “Toronto” out of the title, for fear of alienating readers in the rest of the country.
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